


The Second

by miranda_wave (miranda_askher)



Series: Tales [1]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Gen, Past slayers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-16
Updated: 2011-05-16
Packaged: 2017-10-19 11:26:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,450
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/200323
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/miranda_askher/pseuds/miranda_wave
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I will fight, and I will die. But I am not the hunt. I am not the kill. They are mine, but I am not theirs.</p><p>Everyone remembers the first. No one ever remembers the second.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Second

**Author's Note:**

> Actually, this time I do own something.
> 
> Just not most of it.

I only know from the dreams.

The darkness is thick and whole. Part of the darkness has too many arms, sometimes. Or a tail, or pointed ears and a face that’s wrong. Part of the darkness wears rags and carries a knife and keeps her face in shadow.

Sometimes she speaks to me.

“Only the fight…only the kill.”

Sometimes I wake screaming. I cry in my sister’s arms.

I don’t know how my dreams travel from me to my sister to the elders. I don’t know that they have, until the men are assembled and my father and brothers deliver me to those three hard, shadowy faces. And they tell me to leave.

“You see evil here, and evil will follow you! Be nameless, and be gone.”

Three of the men have dragged me to the outer circle of huts before I think to struggle.

It is like a fire waking from embers in the wind. Fist, foot, fist. The three go down before I think. There is a crack as the third falls. He doesn’t move.

These hands are not mine.

“You see! Demons have taken her. She is impure!”

I see the faces of my sisters and mother. Shock, sorrow. But these are not my hands, never my hands anymore.

I walk away.

* * *

There was another nameless, before. I was a child when she was cast out, and have long forgotten her face. But I remember we once called her Sineya.

* * *

That first night my sister slips out to me where I have taken shelter near the burying ground. She brings food, water, tears of apology.

I want them to touch me, but they seem too far away.

* * *

In my dream the woman whose knife never stops turns to me, and in the dream I know her face. Sineya.

“There is only the fight, only the kill. Go now! The kill!”

I am awake and staring into golden eyes and an inhuman face. I find a stick in my hand, and I am plunging through flesh, through gore, for a silent heart. I faint in a haze of dust.

In the morning the stick is in my hand, but I see no blood, only the sand around me, and the graves.

* * *

Over the next days the nightmares invade my waking life. The little stick does not leave my hand. I plunge and slash at horrors that appear silently and vanish into dust.

The moon changes, and changes again. I knew a madman once, in the village I barely remember.

* * *

I see them one night—the girl struggling with one of my horrors. The stick is a reflex now.

I remember enough not to stab the girl, and she does not vanish.

I bare my teeth and growl. Sometimes this makes the animals run. She bursts into tears, calls me by a name I do not know. But I do know.

I cannot stay upright. She thrusts an object into my hands, whispers urgently, runs away.

My eyes follow her for a long time before I look at the stone knife lying across my palms.

“They’re watching you.”

* * *

My dreams are always haunted, the thick darkness of tooth and claw, but that night she is there again.

“There is nothing but the fight. The kill! There is nothing—“

“Sineya.” It is the first word I have spoken in my dreams. I feel like I am speaking through sand, the word almost impossible to pronounce, a language I have never heard.

“That is not my name. I am nameless.” But I have already seen her face.

“I am sorry for what we did to you.” And I realize I am.

“We are nameless. We are the fight. We stay here, we kill here, we die. There will be others, after.”

I know, suddenly, whose knife I am holding.

Nameless is what they called her, when I was a small girl and the elders cast Sineya out—to fight and die alone for them. Nameless is what they called me. I wonder if she broke the bones of a man she knew when they dragged her out of the village. I wonder how many names and days she forgot among the graves.

It has been months since I remembered the clarity of anger.

“I am sorry. The fight is the fight, the kill is the kill. I had a name once, and I will not die without one.”

Her face is fierce behind the paint, but I think her eyes are wistful as she disappears.

* * *

The next morning I walk away.

I carry the fight with me, walking left from the rising sun. The horrors follow me, and I avoid villages, but my moving feet make me feel more real.

There is a river, finally, and I continue along its course. At night it holds its own demons, but during the day it is so beautiful that I begin to forget my nightmares.

* * *

One morning beside the river I find a strange-shaped hut of stone. I will learn later that it is a pyramid, but all I know is that I have never seen anything like it. Nor have I seen anyone like the woman standing before it, whose skin is the color of clouds against eyes that match the river, with hair the color of great age framing a face as young as mine.

She greets me in my own language: “Slayer.”

* * *

The guardian is a mystery. She asks for the knife one day and I give it to her. I have not had it away from my hand or its wrappings at my hip since it came to me. She holds it in her strong hand and I see that this woman, who gently healed my bruises, who coaxes our food from the sand, could kill me as easily as she could breathe. This woman who soothes nightmares and draws me into human conversation again is _powerful_.

“Ah, Sineya,” she says, turning the blade over in her hands—though I have never told her my most terrifying dreams. “Just too good at being what they wanted you to be. If you had been a little less talented, you might not have lost so much, and I might have reached you in time.” She sets down the knife and turns to me. “You, however, are more promising.”

She leads me deeper into the pyramid. “Your strength is will. She, for all her talent, lacked that. But I suspect the greatest of your line will be rich in it.”

There is something wrapped in leather on a pedestal before us. She removes the covering, revealing a sweep of silver blade, a sharp wooden point, a studded grip. It is a weapon that calls to my hands three ways, whose clean lines scream of the fight—the beauty of it, beyond winning or losing, fluidity, harmony. Balance.

“A terrible thing has been done to you, you and Sineya before you. Power has been forced on you, with no knowledge and little aid.

“I cannot unmake the line of slayers. Knowing the little I do of what’s to come, I am not sure I would now, if I could. I cannot keep you from fighting or dying. But I can tip the scales in your favor, and your descendants’ favor, if you will help me. Will you help me?”

It is nice to be asked, so I do.

* * *

In the end, helping is simple. She uses Sineya’s knife, cuts my palm, lets the blood run down onto the great silver blade.

“Blood of the slayer, willingly given: may the line be strengthened, each to the next. Let many guide one, and one be as many!”

Something leaves me, and my head goes light. She turns to me. Her eyes are white, but her face is kind.

“Your home, your family, your name were taken from you by those who live in fear. You will be called Magal, and your name is the joy, the thanksgiving, the fellowship of good things gathered together.”

She lowers me gently to the floor and takes my face between her hands. Above us I can see the blade change, swallowing up my blood, red now instead of silver. The horrors will follow me, and I will fight, and I will die, but I am not the hunt. I am not the kill. Those things are in that broad sweep of red. They are mine, but I am not theirs.

“Thank you,” I breathe.

Her smile is sad as she wraps my hand. She will keep me safe until it heals enough to hold a weapon.

“Everyone deserves a chance to live in peace, for a little while.”

**Author's Note:**

> Author's note:
> 
> "Magal" means "scythe" in Hebrew. It's masculine, but what can you do.


End file.
